Brian Logan:

Three backsides are perched on a trestle table. They’re talking to us: quoting from ignorant reviews and commentating on their own show as a sneering critic might. I admit I may not be the best person to interpret this picture, but might Adrienne Truscott, Ursula Martinez and Zoe Coombs Marr be telling us that critics talk out of their arses? If so, my own buttocks got a good warm-up before I wrote this review by clenching involuntarily throughout act one, as public humiliation loomed with the threat of an airing of the inane things I’ve probably written about the performers in the show.

I was spared – several colleagues weren’t, as the women named and shamed the men (and it was invariably men) behind the worst hatchet jobs they’ve received. In a show whose text stitches together quotes from hostile reviews, one critical phrase the three latch on to is “for no apparent reason”. Wild Bore explores the relationship between artists and critics, and focuses on critics’ obsession with, and monopoly over, reason and meaning. But who sets the aesthetic rules? Who has the last word? What gives one way of seeing any authority over others?

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If I’ve given you the impression of a staged academic debate, well that’s my critical failing because there’s nothing academic about Wild Bore, the creators of which are among the most flamboyant and subversive artists around. The show is an exercise in scrambling the search for meaning, and it delights in upending our expectations and making improbable things happen for, if not no apparent reason, then not always as much reason as we male critics might wish.

One scene finds the trio stuffing food into their arse-faces, another puts Truscott on Coombs Marr’s shoulders and dresses them both as an anchovy, and by the end they’re all circuiting the stage, nude, with a transgender Asian performance artist in hot pursuit. It’s a caper, in other words, but one underpinned by fierce intelligence and an urge to complicate and democratise the standards by which theatre is judged.

It’s not always an easy watch, perhaps least of all for a (white, male) critic – but that feels like the point. Sometimes I got frustrated by the wilful obscurity, sometimes I felt that they were trying to squeeze too much in. When the arse-faces started squirting faeces, my heart sank.

I wondered, too, whether the show was going to acknowledge the need for critics, and the (occasionally) useful role we play. It doesn’t, explicitly – but there’s something about the blasted free-for-all of the show’s end, as even the trio’s own claim to authority has been challenged and undermined, that tacitly makes that point.

“Opinions are like assholes,” Truscott says. “Everyone’s got one.” Wild Bore is a wild, wonderful and withering summons for more opinions from a wider range of voices. For less certainty and more open minds.

Lyn Gardner:

Coombs Marr, Martinez and Truscott’s cheekily entertaining response to the critics who have given their work the bum rap is oddly reminiscent of an early Beckett play, except funnier. At one point Martinez slaps a pair of eyes on her bottom which stare beadily out at the audience.

These women are not the first to turn bad reviews into a show. In 2014, Diana Rigg was at the fringe with No Turn Unstoned, a light-hearted potpourri of bad reviews, including those dished out to herself. One critic described her Eliza Doolittle as being “as vulnerable as the north face of the Eiger”.

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This trio would appreciate the wit of that. Good criticism is sometimes cruel but it can also be vivid and accurate. What they don’t care for is when criticism reveals more about the critic and their prejudices and expectations than it does about the work.

For example: the reviewer who observed of Martinez’s Free Admission that the artist “assembled a breeze block wall for no apparent reason”. No apparent reason? That wall was a ruddy great metaphor staring the audience in the face. Martinez went on a bricklaying course to learn how to build it.

Then there’s the critic who pondered whether a 10-minute scene was there by “dramaturgical design or whimsical accident”. These women can’t resist a good gag, but in a show with plenty of dramaturgical design, there is a constant probing of the relationship between critics and artists. Who gets to sit on high and hand down pronouncements? Who are the cultural gatekeepers, and what happens if they are mostly white men of a particular class, age and educational background? The show could go further in proposing new and more fruitful models for that relationship. But it’s a sharply satirical and thoughtful hour that arrives at a crucial juncture in the debate about how we talk and write about culture.